14. The Development of the German Soul

We hear words about German freedom from a German, from Professor Troeltsch. Of course I do not want to take his point of view, but I am characterizing the peculiarities of the German soul. With truly German thoroughness, but also with German acumen, he sets about showing how freedom is shaded according to the Italian, the English, and the French national character. He conscientiously accounts for how the idea of freedom is conceived among these nations. And then he attempts to characterize the concept of freedom that the German people have, a concept of freedom of which Herman Grimm himself also spoke, more beautifully than Troeltsch, but in almost similar words: “It was reserved for the German people to recognize as the character of the human being in the idea that freedom which unites the full development of human individuality and personality with harmonious cooperation in the totality.” When such people characterize freedom in such a way that man works in freedom, it is always meant that what can flow from his soul as freedom is integrated into spiritual life. And especially before the middle of the last century, no German could have spoken of freedom without characterizing this freedom from the depths of spiritual life. It was only after the English influences in the second half of the nineteenth century that Germans also more or less abandoned this. But little by little they are coming back to it. And the essay continues: “If one wants to formulate a formula for German unity, one could say: organized national unity based on a dutiful and at the same time critical devotion of the individual to the whole, supplemented and corrected by the independence and individuality of free spiritual education.” — At least one idea of freedom, albeit perhaps one that could be called pedantic, but one shaped out of the abundance of spiritual understanding, an answer from the spirit to the question: What is freedom?